3D CG to 3D Printable model converter CGto3DPrint

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3D CG to 3D Printable 3D model converter for Windows PC

CGto3DPrint is a free software that converts 3D CG(Computer Graphics) models to 3D printable manifold 3D models using MeshLab for surface mesh to voxel conversion and Blender for baking color textures.

Converted 3D models are automatically exported from Blender to STL file for single color 3D Printing or manually exported to PLY file for full color 3D Printing.

Please try from the link below.
Download CGto3DPrint

Hi,

This tool is awesome. There are so many objects out there that are available as 3D scans but completely unprintable. For example, I'm trying to make a 3D-printable model of the Wright 1903 Flyer, based on the Smithsonian 3D scan. This is a single .OBJ file of 700MB... it looks great on the screen, but needs lots of work to make it printable. I've cut it up into logical components, but even then they are (a) too detailed, and (b) not manifold.

Some feedback:

1. Make the "Download" link on your page more prominent. I wandered around the site a bit before I noticed the "Download" in pale blue on a white background. Irritating rather than a serious problem.
2. The Download link takes me to Google Drive, which took me a moment or two to realize, and then to find the download link. Irritating rather than a serious problem.
3. The download itself seems to be the actual executable folder, including DLLs, etc which needs to be installed in C:\. This is a bit unusual nowadays... it would be better if it was a standard "Setup.exe" or .msi installation which also set up an uninstall process.
4. The installation process isn't explained clearly... halfway down page 5 of the manual is a section titled "How to use" -- section 1 of this seems to be the installation instructions.
5. In Blender v2.76b on my machine, I see a warning for “UV:Bake UV-Texture to Vertex Color” add-on: "Requires image texture, generated textures aren't supported". Is that significant? It seems to still work OK. What version(s) of Blender are supported? Now downloading v2.77.
6. The manual's "How to use" section 2-4 seems to be about converting whatever input file into blender format. Is that right?
7. I tried steps 5-9 just using the defaults, including the sample.blend file supplied, without doing steps 2-4 (since I expect that the sample is all ready to go). I'm not sure how I should know when "Job Completed"... apparently when Blender displays the object on its screen?
8. A new file RGBCube.001.stl was created. I'd expected it to be sample.stl, but OK, whatever.
9. The file loads OK into Cura, and is in fact a cube. But really, this is not a very impressive sample. Maybe you could set up a sample that's a scanned object or something? Maybe the Spitfire example used in the manual?
10. It would be good to have some kind of progress indication, or at least a prior estimate of how long the process will take. I don't particularly care if it takes 1 or 24 hours, but would like an indication. But I really would like to know if it's going to take 2400 hours.
11. Or maybe some UI options for reducing the quality in return for reducing processing time?
12. For generality, the voxel size should be a percentage of the object size (maybe the longest X/Y/Z dimension), and also entered in the the user interface like the "Modifier Decimate Collapse" value.
    
    After the cube, I tried an object of my own that I've been trying to convert for some time... the Flyer's lower elevator. This is an 18MB .blend file (after I'd already manually reduced it from 80MB using MeshLab) compared to your sample's size of 671KB. After an hour of Blender running (Not Responding), and one CPU core (i5 quad-core 3GHz) continuously running meshlabserver.exe in 6GB of memory,and me actually reading through the manual, I abandoned this conversion. I believe that, because my model file is full scale (i.e. 9m x 1.3m x 0.1m = 1.17m^3 = 1.17E9 mm^3 = 1.4625E10 voxels) it would take an enternity. Since I plan to scale the object down by 25:1, I changed the voxel size to 5.0, and started again. This time it completed in about 30 minutes
13. The menu seems to be just links to websites

Thanks again for this tool. If there's anything I can do to contribute towards this project, please let me know.

Frank

Hi Frank,

Thank you for your serious feedback.

Following is my answers.
I think this tool will expand possibility of 3D models and modeling for 3D printing.

1. I will change Download link on my site to be better looking.
2. Since the file size is a bit big (53m b) for the server, I placed it on Google Drive but it seems confusing. So, I should place it on my server.
3. Sure. I should have a setup file.
4. So, set up process in the manual should be revised after creating setup file.
5. I have realized the warning. But at least it is working, I judged it is OK. But I will check the add-on in detail.
6. Yes, basically, whatever files that can be imported to Blender, they should be fine for conversion.
7. During conversion, I recommend to show the command line tool window of Blender to see the progress. When "Job Completed" words is shown, you will see a new object with the name "original object name.001". It is the converted object. You can also find a STL file in the same folder as the Blender file.
8. The converted object has file name not "Blender file name .001.STL" but "Blender Object Name .001.STL".
9. OK. I should attach better sample file.
10. Regarding file progress indication, I will think how we can show it.
11. Sure. We might need to have UI to change voxel conversion quality setting. I will think.
12. Same as 11. I should have UI for voxel conversion setting.
Please test with smaller items. Unfortunately, it takes certain time for conversion.
13. Maybe we should have better menu.

Thank you again for the feedback. It is already a great contribution.
With your suggestion, I will improve the tool. After the revision, I would like you to try again. Then, I would like another feedback.

Thank you.

Lunavast

One other thing... what about a Linux version?